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The Travels Of Ibn Battuta 1325– 1354 Volume I-IV

by: Ibn Battuta

Publication date: 1354-06-30

Usage: Public Domain Mark 1.0

Topics: Travel, Literature, Africa, Asia, India, West Africa, Bengal, China, Ceylon

Collection: opensource

Language: English

Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier in 1304. Between 1324 and 1354 he journeyed through North Africa and Asia Minor and as far as China. On a separate voyage he crossed the Sahara to the Muslim lands of West Africa. His journeys are estimated to have covered over 75,000 miles and he is the only medieval traveller known to have visited every Muslim state of the time, besides the 'infidel' countries of Istanbul, Ceylon and China.

The first volume recorded Ibn Battuta's earliest journeys through Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Arabia.

Volume II continues with his journeys through Persia, Iraq and Arabia, Asia Minor and South Russia with detailed descriptions of the towns on the way and the customs of the inhabitants. Sir Hamilton Gibb's edition comprises four volumes with introduction and full notes. This first complete and scholarly edition in English has proved essential to orientalists and illuminating to medievalists. The travels are a major source for the political and economic life of large regions of Asia and Africa. The observations of this intelligent representative of Islamic culture on almost all the known inhabited world beyond Europe provide fruitful comparisons with the life and geographical knowledge of the West. Translated with revisions and new annotation from the Arabic text edited by C. Defrmery and B.R. Sanguinetti. Continued from Second Series 110, with continuous main pagination. Covering southern Persia, Iraq, southern Arabia, East Africa, the Persian Gulf, Asia Minor and South Russia. Continued in Second Series 141 and 178, with index in 190.

Volume III ended with Ibn Battuta's appointment by the Sultan of Delhi to accompany an embassy to China.

In Volume IV he describes his journey to the coast where he embarked near Cambay and sailed to Calicut. Here the ships which were to take them to China were wrecked. Ibn Battuta joined the Sultan of Honavar in a temporarily successful attack on Goa, and then went to the Maldives, which had not long been converted to Islam by another North African. Here he functioned as a judge, married into the ruling elite, and became involved in a plot to bring the islands under the authority of a bloodthirsty Sultan in south India. On the way to join him, Ibn Battuta found himself in Ceylon and took the opportunity to climb Adam's Peak. He abandoned the planned invasion of the Maldives, to which he returned briefly, and the sailed to Bengal to visit an ascetic in Sylhet. He claims to have visited several countries in south-east Asia, including Sumatra and Java and some which cannot be satisfactorily identified, and arrived at Ch'uan-chou in China. After going to Canton he travelled by a non-existent river to Hang-chou and Beijing. His return to Morocco, during which he witnessed the ravages of the Black Death in Syria and Egypt, and called at Cagliari in a Catalan ship, is described summarily. He made two more journeys, the first to part of Spain still under Muslim rule, which included Gibraltar, Ronda, Malaga and Granada, and the other across the Sahara to the kingdom of Mali on the upper Niger, from which he returned to Fez via Timbuktu, Gao, Air, the Hoggar country and Tuatan.